Competitors in the Crosshairs: 2009 Nissan GT-R

Seven faces of fast stare down Nissan's upstart worldbeater. Who will budge first?

JARED HOLSTEIN

Apr 4, 2008

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Despite our bedtime prayers, vehicle performance has not increased in proportion to Moore’s law, which postulates that the performance of integrated circuits approximately doubles every 18 months. It is, however, in large part due to the exponential increases in computing power that vehicles are significantly safer, faster, and more powerful than they were a decade ago—all while producing fewer harmful emissions. Processing power is supplanting the expensive hardware required for big power and, more to the point, big speed.

No car better exemplifies this shift than the $70,475 Nissan GT-R, a fire-breathing, all-conquering machine as fast for its sensors and processors as for its big, turbocharged (and electronically controlled) 480 horsepower.

A second shift is this: The GT-R—one of the quickest, fastest, most capable, and, arguably, desirable cars in the world—shares a showroom and engineers with the $13,335 Versa. Speed is being pried from the grip of big money. Viva la revolución!

Purists with hineys sore from both the spanking the GT-R just handed their half-million-dollar supercar and the extraction of the latter’s monthly payment may balk at the GT-R’s appearance, but we say they’re wrong. And we’d still want one even if it were shaped like a vole’s colon. The wind tunnel says the GT-R’s deliberate shape is nearly as slippery as the Teflon Toyota Prius’s, and unlike many so-called supercars, it generates meaningful downforce at both ends.

Few Japanese cars in history can be called loin stirring, even if many elicit a pounding heart. This is partly because the Japanese aesthetic celebrates a different kind of sensuality, and we’re biased toward a Western definition that values proportions and body lines not far divorced from corseted waists and comely hips. The GT-R exists as a focused instrument of velocity. That’s good enough—we’ll take form after function.

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Surely when the GT-R’s numbers and driving impressions hit the wires, appropriate translations of “Oh, s%#t!” were muttered in boardrooms from Stuttgart to Maranello and Detroit to Munich. Alternatives to the GT-R fight an uphill battle. In a remarkably broad price range, the Nissan offers a virtuosity-to-dollar ratio that’s tough to beat. Some cars on this list do other things better: make you look rich, smell fancy, be expensive, flash fine pedigree papers, etc. Only one of them, the BMW M3, costs less, but it, frankly, isn’t even in the same stratosphere. The rest cost a little or—usually—a lot more and put up a better fight before seeing firsthand, after lap one or lap eight, how many LEDs ring the GT-R’s taillights.

You might want to thank Sony’s PlayStation and its game Gran Turismo for creating the demand and possibly thus the opportunity to buy the sixth and newest generation of the Nissan GT-R. And you’ll want to thank Nissan for building a car that produces numbers so implausibly quick you’d think the car were governed by the physics built into a video game.

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We’ll be the first to call BS on the underrated horsepower and torque figures. Our suspicions are supported by reports that GT-Rs have been making 480 horsepower all right, but at the wheels, instead of at the crankshaft as Nissan claims. For that kind of power to be making it to the road, the engine has to be producing more like 550 ponies.

That’s a lie we can live with, as it translates into the kind of dynamic moxie required to lap Germany’s legendary Nordschleife at the Nürburgring in 7 minutes and 38 seconds. For comparison, Chevy’s record with the Corvette Z06 is 7 minutes 43 seconds, a time Porsche claims its 911 GT3 will match.

What’s more, the GT-R’s tunnel-vision-inducing 3.3-second 0-to-60 time comes from a stock vehicle. Japanese tuners, some of whom have been tinkering with Skylines (as the GT-R is know in its home market) since the Nixon administration, have examples in full teardown, looking for even more go. May the gods of speeds offer their bounty! If you like your extra speed with a factory warranty, a lighter, more powerful Spec V is on the way in another year or so.

We guess people will be paying six figures when the limited number of examples available in this country is meted out, one or two at a time, to dealers with the scruples of payday loan operators. Extra scarcity will also come from every other manufacturer in the world each purchasing and slicing into several GT-Rs in search of its speed mojo.

We recently proffered the $110,000 R8 as a sensible alternative to the approximately $250,000 Alfa Romeo 8C, along with cars costing as much as $325,000. The R8 is much lauded for being a fantastic driving companion, not only because it hastens your journey in ease and comfort but also because it makes going fast intuitive and easy. The R8’s all-wheel-drive system, like the GT-R’s, is designed to help you go faster rather than just keep you from sliding backward into an oak tree at a regrettable speed. The car is so well planted, in fact, that its 420 horsepower sometimes feel too few. Compared with the GT-R, the R8 is indeed slow: A 12.6-second quarter-mile at 113 mph is tired when measured against 11.5 seconds at 124.

These numbers mean something to us, and probably to most of you. Then there are the people, and quite a lot of them, who wouldn’t drive a Nissan if it pooped gold bullion, not because of Pearl Harbor, but because it just wouldn’t do to valet anything but a European marque.

The other area in which the GT-R, for all its genius, can’t compete is sex appeal. The R8 is simply fetching. It’s unique enough that people stare, as we stare at any form that falls outside the visual norm. Noncar types, on learning our profession, often throw out that they “love the R8,” just as they see an ad for a Vitra lamp and want one of those, too. Even if it costs about $40,000 more than a GT-R, it possesses more exotic appeal than most exotics, and far more than the GT-R will ever know.

The BMW M3 is the least exotic car on this list, and unsurprisingly, the least pricey. It well meets the traditional requirements of a sports car and is able to satisfy the most ardent apex hound and the status buyer who has never heard the far side of 5000 rpm, which is a shame, because that’s where the M3 shares the most with the GT-R: a high-technology, addictive engine.

Although the GT-R produces horsepower by shoveling in supra-atmospheric amounts of air and fuel with twin turbochargers, the M3 makes it the old-fashioned way with compression and revs. The principles might be traditional, but there’s nothing old-fashioned about Double VANOS variable valve control, individual electronically controlled throttle bodies, and an 8300-rpm redline. The M3’s 414-hp V-8 is the closest thing under $100,000 to having a Cosworth F1 engine doing your bidding on the street.

The M3 can match the GT-R, at least partly, on its use of exotic materials and race-bred parts. Both employ lots of carbon fiber, pit-lane-proud brakes, and forged aluminum suspension components. And unlike the GT-R, the M3 can be bought with four doors, meaning you can transport adults in the rear seats without first slipping them Valium.

The reality is that if you click enough options boxes, you can spec an M3 with an asking price greater than the GT-R’s. If the GT-R presents a compelling case against vehicles more than three times its price, you have to be really, really serious about the M3 to want one for the same dough.

When the yardstick for ultimate performance and value, the Corvette Z06, seems suddenly crude, even prosaic, you know the rules have changed. Even so, if a Dodge Viper approaches speed with the delicacy of a wrecking ball, the Z06 is a perfectly weighted framing hammer, a tool whose modest price bears no correlation to its cogency. A wonderful synthesis of carbon fiber, titanium, pushrods, and transverse leaf springs, the Z06 is the all-American definition of fast, both evolutionary and a little bit revolutionary. It’s still a Chevy, after all, so one of the best all-around-performing cars extant can be serviced anywhere you see a bow tie, and it’s bargain-priced at $72,125.

If the GT-R is digital, the Z06 is analog. Oversteer is a proper instruction away in both cars, but whereas the GT-R asks that you just apply more gas to solve the situation (bless the ATTESA E-TS all-wheel drive’s little processor-controlled heart), you had better have some organic countersteer and throttle modulation ready in the Z06.

Chevy buyers and renters need no longer suffer blocky Legoland interiors, but to say the interior of the Z06 is anything but a nice GM interior would be too-high praise. Worse, a car with more rib-bruising potential than a midway Scrambler’s is fitted with seats built for people who drive with only one hand on the steering wheel—loose. The upside to this is that the Z06 is just as well suited as any other Vette to such tasks as commuting or tracing old Route 66. Moreover, the Z06 gets 24 mpg on the highway—more like a Pontiac Grand Prix than a 505-hp car that will go 198 mph.

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If the beef-burner GT-R makes your red, white, and blue blood boil, just wait for the 625-hp ZR1, which will cost about what the GT-R will after dealer markups—before the inevitable dealer markups of its own—and promises performance on par with an improperly pumped Barry Bonds.

Being bestowed the title “best sports car in the world” by the biggest car magazine on the world gives Ferrari managers proper due to rest for a moment on their laurels, which they are gladly not doing. The F430 lineup continues to proliferate and now includes a lighter, more powerful Scuderia derivative alongside the F430 and F430 Spider.

Despite the F430’s 483 horsepower, faster and cheaper cars that generate quicker time slips are not innumerable. They are not, however, Ferraris. The F430 affects you like an electrode implanted straight into your nucleus accumbens, holding you in such rapture that you really don’t give a rip that a Corvette Z06 laps faster and costs less than half as much.

Unlike most cars on this list, just the oil changes make the F430 costly as a daily driver, even if it has a practical amount of space in the front trunk and, in tune with the demographic, room enough behind the seats to stow a bag of golf clubs. True, it’s not an all-weather machine like the GT-R, but chances are if you can afford an F430, you can also afford to buy a GT-R without taking out a second mortgage, or maybe by just swiping that black AmEx tucked into your Prada wallet.

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Downsides to owning an F430 include resulting mailings for hair-replacement services and hanging out with fellow owners who wear bespoke race suits with matching shoes at Ferrari-club track weekends but then turn numbingly slow laps. Downsides to driving an F430? Don’t be ridiculous.

Coming up a little short on the Reventón’s $1.4 million asking price? Pop yourself into the Gallardo LP560-4, which borrows many of the bigger bull’s visual cues, for the low, low price of something around $200,000. If you read our SEMA coverage, you’ll know what fans we are of matte and semi-matte finishes, and in deference to the Reventón, the Gallardo is available in a tasty matte white pearl. This finish does much to complement the Lambo’s improved shape, blessing the transitions between sheer and swoop with greater nuance and depth.

The GT-R and the LP560-4 will likely feature acceleration numbers close enough not to matter much, and yes, the Lambo will best the GT-R’s top speed, that ever-so-academic measure of automotive greatness. Like all Lamborghinis, enthusiastic driving will probably be curtailed with understeer, which can be made neutral with judicious throttle application. If lurid power slides are what melt your butter, this is not the car for you. The GT-R, on the other hand, employs oversteer, in precisely metered amounts, to rotate the car toward the apex and set you up for the ideal corner exit, making it look as if you actually know what you’re doing.

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The GT-R, by virtue of employing six cylinders muffled handily by two turbos, can be made loud but not easily melodious. The 552-hp Gallardo LP560-4, however, sounds like someone strapped a French horn to the business end of a Minuteman rocket. In tone with the rest of the exotica, the extremely low rotational mass of the Gallardo’s engine parts is flaunted by its ability to build revs like an impact wrench.

Much how a prim, matronly type chooses but one poignant moment a year to crack a fart joke, every so often a manufacturer will release a vehicle delightfully out of character, as pleasant for the context from which it slipped as its lovely excesses.

The CLK63 AMG Black Series is this unexpected but wholly welcome Mercedes moment. That it inspired the words “holy farging bargehole” to be jotted in its logbook gives you an idea of the office politics involved in wrangling the keys to this 500-hp bahn stormer.

For all its luxury credentials, the CLK63 AMG Black Series can hang with the GT-R when acceleration gets lateral, as evidenced by lap times on the Nordschleife within fender-rubbing seconds of the Nissan’s. More to the point, the GT-R hides its speed in smoothness and its grunt behind a perhaps too-muted exhaust; the Black Series marks large throttle application with a glorious combustive revue.

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When you’re not playing at racing an invisible field of DTM cars up your favorite mountain, relishing in the car’s precise steering and drivability at the limit, the Black Series is as “comfortable as anything short of an S-class.” This comfort is just for you and a passenger, however, as Mercedes ditches the pretense and weight of rear seats.

Tuned cars, even those sold by manufacturers, tend to be compromised and feature something glaring we wish were different. With the CLK63 AMG Black Series, it’s only the $135,825 price we’d change, not that those dollars aren’t justified in carbon fiber, extensive development, and exclusivity. Demand was high enough that Mercedes has decided to increase the Black Series run in the U.S. by an additional 50 cars, meaning a total of 400.

Somewhere in Stuttgart, an engineer is kicking wildly at the 911 Turbo’s 480-hp flat-six engine, easily kicked because it’s in the wrong place—at least according to physics textbooks—and because it makes his job of producing one of the most desirable sports cars in the world increasingly difficult.

The storied 911 Turbo was Nissan’s benchmark for the 2009 GT-R, quite a compliment, considering the GT-R itself has been in development for 39 years. Perhaps a result of the quest to retain a streetable ride despite being heavy with trappings of luxury, the 911 Turbo behaves a bit like a racehorse at the limit: It’s fast, but there’s an ever-present possibility of control becoming suddenly very relative. “Spring-loaded for oversteer” is how one tester described the Turbo’s display of midcorner drop-throttle oversteer, a trait associated with 911s, since, well, always. This behavior is far more likely experienced on the track than on the street, where you shouldn’t be driving 10/10th anyway.

So what does the extra $50,000 over the cost of a GT-R get you? A great interior, classic lines, and Porsche cachet. The perennial success of the 911 Turbo is almost aberrant given America’s preference for expensive cars that convey in rather obvious ways that they’re really expensive, and the Turbo doesn’t. To those in the know, air intakes and extra-wide rubber are speed markers; for everyone else, it’s just another sexy Porsche.

Porschephiles, however, know they’re getting a celebration of beauty, history, crushing acceleration, and everyday drivability that will see Super 150s wool-burnishing Turbo seat leather as long as Porsche sees fit to produce it. Competitive performance or not, the GT-R has a long way to go to establish the same level of international worship.